3D TV systems that are on the market today are typically stereo-based: one image is presented to the left eye and another to the right eye. There are several ways to achieve this effect. For instance, polarizing filters can be used on every second row of the TV together with polarized glasses. Another way is to quickly alternate the left and the right image on the screen and have the user wear shutter glasses that are synchronized with the screen. Digital cinemas today often use a polarization filter in front of the projector. The filter can change direction every 120th of a second, which allows time multiplexing to work together with relatively inexpensive polarized glasses.
However, consumers do not like to wear glasses, and this may be the reason why 3D TV is now seen as a failure within the TV industry. Therefore new TV screens that do not require glasses are emerging.
Glasses free 3D display can be achieved by using a lenticular array in front of the screen. This makes it possible to make some pixels visible only from certain angles. In the simplest form, a lenticular display can be created to have every second column of pixels visible only by the left eye and the remaining columns only visible by the right eye. However, this requires the viewer to be positioned in a very tightly defined sweet spot in front of the display.
Another solution is to use steerable displays that rely on eye-tracking. By finding the position of each eye of the viewer, the display can control the lenticular array so that it is always sending the left image to the left eye and the right image to the right eye. If this is combined with rendering the content from the correct position the effect could be very convincing in theory.
Another way that has been tried to solve this problem is to use so called multi-view displays. Instead of displaying just two views, these displays can display several views with a small distance between. Your left eye may see view number 1 and your right eye may see view number 7. By moving slightly to the right, you may instead see view number 2 and view number 8 and this makes it possible to “look around” objects.
Channel changing, i.e. zapping, has been controlled by a remote control for a long time, after that smart phones and tablets have been used. These prior art channel changing solutions do, however, not exploit the full potentials of multi-view TV. Hence, the prior art channel changing solutions give the viewer a poor overview of the available channels during a channel changing procedure.
US 2011/0164188 relates to a remote control device adapted for use in connection with stereoscopic 3D and multi-view 3D displays. The remote control device is used by a viewer to enable selection of content to be displayed by a display screen. The remote control device is further used to generate location information relating to the position of the eyes of the viewer. A reconfiguration of the screen is then caused based on the location information.